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The Girl in Blue
Barbara J. Hancock


Strange accidents and unexplained deaths are commonplace. And everyone fears the dark in Barbara J. Hancock's Scarlet Falls.A secluded hamlet ablaze in autumn splendor, Scarlet Falls is a seemingly idyllic New England town…. But Trinity Chadwick knows better. The place is haunted to its very core. For Trinity there has been no escape from the specter of the girl in the blue dress. The child's laughter still rides on the tainted mist of the town's frigid lake. And tragedy always follows in its wake.Constant vigilance against malevolent forces has worn Trinity down, driving her back to the last place on earth she ever expected to step foot: Hillhaven–her childhood home. Only to encounter Samuel Creed. The last man she ever expected to confront. A long-ago kiss of life kindled an obsession in both that is at once sensual and macabre. Creed is tortured by that memory. He is as tempting as ever, a man Trinity can neither forget nor entirely trust.







Strange accidents and unexplained deaths are commonplace. And everyone fears the dark in Barbara J. Hancock’s Scarlet Falls.

A secluded hamlet ablaze in autumn splendor, Scarlet Falls is a seemingly idyllic New England town…. But Trinity Chadwick knows better. The place is haunted to its very core. For Trinity there has been no escape from the specter of the girl in the blue dress. The child's laughter still rides on the tainted mist of the town’s frigid lake. And tragedy always follows in its wake.

Constant vigilance against malevolent forces has worn Trinity down, driving her back to the last place on earth she ever expected to step foot: Hillhaven—her childhood home. Only to encounter Samuel Creed. The last man she ever expected to confront. A long-ago kiss of life kindled an obsession in both that is at once sensual and macabre. Creed is tortured by that memory. He is as tempting as ever, a man Trinity can neither forget nor entirely trust.


The Girl in Blue

Barbara J. Hancock






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


Table of Contents

Chapter One (#uc1b00389-3269-5c92-b969-3571c31aa616)

Chapter Two (#u215c1d3f-f0bb-5aba-9662-229d274f4529)

Chapter Three (#u0b1d81e0-7c8b-592c-9215-c9f20197e44d)

Chapter Four (#u5e829a8c-3bc9-56fe-9839-85fc395db9d0)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)


For Todd


One, two…she’s coming for you.

Three, four…who’s at the door?

Five, six…full of tricks.

Seven, eight…too late, too late.

Nine, ten…it’s happening again.


Chapter One

Trinity Chadwick was coming home. It was October and the maples would be ablaze, scorching hill and dale and turning every crag and cranny burnished and bright.

Scarlet Falls, Massachusetts, had mapleleaves in autumn and crimsonwildflowers called crested celosia in spring.

The red leaves and flowers hadn’t given the town its name, though.

Blood was red, too.

Trinity took a deep breath. She’d opened the vent in the bus window as far as it would slide. The fortifying air of the New England countryside was bracing, but oxygen had little to do with the process of shoring up each and every fiber of her being. Awareness was everything.

Scarlet Falls was beautiful, but it was also haunted.

She’d lived with the idyllic and the horrifying her whole life. Nursing school in Boston hadn’t been all that different. Simple on the surface, butscrabble and scrap underneath.

Trinity slowly reached down to finger the bandages on her left arm beneath her black wool pea coat. She’d been lucky. The flames that had engulfed her apartment had killed one friend and badly injured another. The crisp air she’d drawn in now threatened to release in a whimper of remembered fear and pain, but Trinity instead forced it through tight lips in a controlled sigh.

Her arm had been burned when she’d dragged her roommate to safety after the girl had collapsed from smoke inhalation. Other friends—fellow nursing students—had held her back when she would have returned to the burning building. Though she’d been singed and burned, and even now spoke with a smoky rasp to her voice, the press had zeroed in on her “heroics,” ambushing her for interviews.

She wasn’t a hero.

She’d left most of her salvaged belongings, her car and the fall semester of her third year behind in order to escape. As the bus wheezed up the final crimson-decked hillside before it crested the rise by the light of the setting sun and began its decent into Scarlet Falls, Trinity couldn’t help thinking about frying pans and fires.

* * *

The town had a main street that had been constructed more or less during themid–eighteen hundreds. The neighborhood sprawled outward with clapboard and picket fencing. Several churches sat on picturesque high ground with spiky steeples piercing the sky. At least one of them was much older and plainer than its fellows, more Puritan than Victorian, its leeside hunched over and seeming to protect a cemetery of very old graves.

Trinity looked away from worn tombstones and lopsided crypts as the bus labored by. She turned her face toward the distant black gleam of glassy water on the horizon. A mere glimpse of High Lake was enough to send chilly fingers of dread down her spine. So she faced forward, lifting her chin rather than cowering in the corner of her seat. Her stop was near the river. As the bus approached, the gloaming light softly illuminated the covered bridge that spanned the flowing water. She would have to cross it on foot and climb the last rise to Hillhaven.

Then she would be home.

No one would be there to greet her. Her parents were finally retired from their respective jobs as teacher and postal worker. They had saved for years for their current extended trip to Europe. Trinity hadn’t called to tell them about the fire or her burns. Just as she’d never told them about The Girl in Blue.

She would be alone at Hillhaven, which would be both a boon and a curse.

The bus pulled away in a fog of diesel exhaust and a cacophony of grinding gears. Trinity was left with a stuffed backpack and a constricted chest in the deepening twilight of evening.

A dog barked in the distance. The river was low and gently lapping over rock and driftwood after a long, dry summer. High Lake was all the way across town and out of sight now, even if she should look in its direction.

She didn’t.

Trinity shouldered her bag over her uninjured right arm and turned to face the dark maw of the bridge. How long did she stand there, rooted in place and not looking toward the lake, while the bus drove out of sight? Night had descended in a cool wash of sensory deprivation and inky blackness. She was an adult now. Well past the age where darkness should have been a threat to her. Nevertheless, her heart rate increased. In a place where having your senses peeled might mean the difference between life and death, limited visibility should be frightening.

Nothing to see here, move along. One foot in front of the other.

Her footsteps echoed on the old oak boards beneath her feet. The noise was creaky and low. Scree. Scree. Scree. It was a long way across the river in the echoing belly of the bridge. Too long.

A child’s laughter rang out softly behind her.

Trinity paused to look back. Useless, but instinctive. She couldn’t stop herself.

There was no one there.

She blinked, straining her eyes against the deepening pitch. The moon had yet to rise. The air was cool and still. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze. She couldn’t see back the way she’d come. The interior of the covered bridge was pitch-black.

But she heard no steps or any other sound. Only the memory of that familiar laugh echoing in her ears.

Trinity forced herself to turn and continue toward the house. She did pause one more time with a start. A light had come on in one of the upper front rooms. A large shadow passed in front of the light behind a pulled shade, and Trinity knew that someone—or something—was home.

* * *

Hillhaven had been built before Scarlet Falls was more than a muddy little settlement beside a useful river in the 1600s. The original structure had been a mill, but that had long since given over to a great rectangle of a home with a gabled roof and spidery gingerbread trim. The roof was steep and flat across its peak, complete with a widow’s walk where a brass telescope had been used to peer down at the town.

Trinity had done her share of peering.

Always watching. Always trying to help.

In the dark, with a crescent moon too slim to light her way, Trinity could only imagine the gray paint and even grayer shutters. Her parents hadn’t been able to fight time or tradition, and though she was sure her mother had chosen red curtains to offset the colonial drab, the effect was jarring.

She was glad it was too dark to see the arterial fabric peeking out from behind every pane as she walked up to the front door. The key on her keychain rattled in the lock. How many times had she almost thrown it away?

Another childish laugh sounded in the darkness behind her. Its playful innocence caused a renewed surge of dreadto twist up her spine. This time she didn’t look. She twisted the key, urgency causing her fingers to slip and her teeth to nip her tongue. She’d always thought The Girl in Blue was a benign nuisance. A terror gotten used to. No more. No less. There had been other things to fear in Scarlet Falls. Deadlier things. But after the fire in Boston she was no longer so sure.

“Oh,” she gasped when she finally turned the knob and pushed her way inside. She closed the door behind her against the laugh…and the actual danger it might herald.

The strong scent of Scotch confronted her entrance.

Stunned, Trinity dropped her backpack to the floor.

She didn’t clench her fists or dig in her pocket for her phone when the man came around the corner. He was big and tall, and decidedly in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Trinity didn’t scream. Even when he took a swig from the bottle in his hands and narrowedagate eyes that gleamed in the glow of the fireplace, she just bit her lip and refused to cry out.

She had plenty of practice dealing with macabre surprises. Finding a dead man in the front hall of Hillhaven was cake. Absolute cake.

So, though her heart thumped audibly in her ears, her raw throat narrowed and her spine turned to ice, she didn’t scream.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Samuel Creed asked. His voice was deceptively calm and quiet, belying the shadowed glitter of his eyes.

“I have a key and a bedroom upstairs,” Trinity pointed out. She used the key to gesture toward the ceiling at her room above them.

“With ridiculous posters on the wall,” Creed said. His brow was heavy, and he took another sip from the Scotch. The perfect angle of his jaw and the line of his throat when he swallowed were much more ridiculous than any posters she had left over from high school.

“Is that my father’s whiskey?” she asked.

Not “Why are you here?”

Not “Get the hell out.”

Creed leaned his hip against her mother’s antique sofa table and crossed his long, lean legs at the ankle. He crossed his arms, too, Scotch bottle and all, and Trinity swallowed and blinked. It had been three years since she’d seen him. In that time, he’d gone from a brooding post-teen to anadult—the change seemed menacing. She had saved him. She’d administered the CPR that had brought him back to life. But seeing him was always a jolt. It had been when she’d lived in town. It was more so now.

The smirk on his lips was decidedly more sensual, and his hair was still too long. Heavy brown waves fell over his forehead, and even though its edges were less jagged, they still shadowed his already dark eyes. His chest had become more muscular, and it finally matched the broad shoulders that had seemed too angular years ago. In fact, the sleek black shirt he wore unbuttoned at the neck and rolled to his elbows accented the width and breadth of his maturity with startling style.

“I’m too particular to borrow,” Creed said. He tipped the label her way, and she saw it was a brand her father would never have splurged on with a postman’s salary.

Trinity needed him to leave.

From the time he’d fallen into the freezing lake and had then been hauled out stiff and blue and unresponsive for far too long, Samuel Creed had been a vaguely threatening addition to the things that already menaced her life. He’d already graduated from high school at that point. He’d been just shy of eighteen. She’d been almost four years younger and just starting high school. The chasm between them was so great that only a desperate life-and-death situation hadbridged the gap.

“What are you doing here?”

The question came simultaneouslyfrom them both in an odd, amplified cadence that was almost as eerie as the laughter Trinity had tried to lock outside.

“I’m house-sitting for your parents,” Creed said. He swirled the expensive Scotch in his bottle as if he gauged how much he had left.

“There was an…accident…. A fire in my apartment building in Boston,” Trinity said.

At that, Creed stood. He was very tall, and she wasn’t. No longer leaning, he seemed to fill the room. Even more so when he paced toward her. She didn’t know if he moved slowly and deliberately because of the whiskey, or if stalking was simply the way he moved. He’d always been graceful. He’d always liked whiskey. Or, at least, he had since that day by the lake.

“An accident?” he asked.

The cold wood of the door pressed against her back before she realized she’d backed up against it.

Creed came close enough for her to see the thick soot of his coal lashes rimming hismidnight eyes and the glitter of an onyx chip he wore in his left earlobe. His gaze swept her face, then lower, finally coming to rest on the bandages around her wrist peeking out from the sleeve of her coat.

“It’s nothing. I’m fine,” Trinity said.

If possible, his expression turned even darker than before.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

He suddenly reached for her and pulled her coat loose, pushing it off her shoulders. Of course it was crazy, but it was also Creed, so crazy was the least of Trinity’s concerns.

She did step sideways and take over the procedure of disrobing herself. Because she could tell bythe glint in hiscinder eyes that she wouldn’t get away with simply brushing him off.

Her dressings were light and not in the least bit dramatic, but the reveal still added to the storm clouds on Creed’s face.

“One of my friends is dead. Believe me, this is nothing,” Trinity said.

Her voice sounded even huskier than before. Creed’s eyes had been dark and unreadable since that cold frozen day he’d died. Trinity hadn’t been alone in avoiding him since, although she’d probably had more reason to than most. This moment was no different. She should walk away. But something in the luminous depths of his eyes seemed to reflect her own fear.

“You shouldn’t have come back here,” Creed said. The rich scent of mellow Scotch came from him, blended with wood smoke from tending the fire and some other sharper scent she couldn’t place. He’d drowned in late November. She remembered it well. She thought she detected that bite of November wind that had blown along High Lake’s edge that day on his skin.

“I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but I’ve got nowhere else to stay,” Trinity said sarcastically. She bent down to pick up her backpack. When she straightened, he had moved closer. She had to tilt her chin to look up into his face.

It had been so long since she’d seen him. Even longer since she’d pressed her mouth to his icy lips to breathe the fortifying air from her lungs into his. Scarlet Falls was filled with the dead and the dying. That day she’d finally had the chance to stop and reverse one of the tragic accidents that always seemed on the verge of happening.

Many children in town saw and heard things. As they grew—if they grew–they saw and heard less and less.

Except for Trinity.

She saw too much and heard too much long after others seemed to learn to adapt and ignore.

Moving to Boston had seemed to help her…for a little while. But hadn’t she always known it would be impossible to forget the town, not to mention a certain person who lived here?

That cold November evening she’d saved Samuel Creed, but his dark eyes and his fondness for Scotch told a different tale.

“It’s not safe here,” Creed said.

Trinity knew it. She knew it by the shadows that lurked above the tombstones in the old cemetery. She knew it by the unspoken curfew that every child in Scarlet Falls learned to obey and every parent silently enforced. She knew it by the girlish laughter that had followed her home in the night. Somehow she’d always known it by the simmering way Creed had watched her after the incident at the lake—waiting, always waiting.

Yes. By his eyes most of all.

“Nowhere is safe,” Trinity replied.

Then she brushed past her frightening houseguest and made her way upstairs.


Chapter Two

Trinity greeted the sunrise in the back courtyard. She was sheltered from the autumn breeze, but the chill morning air caused her fitted long-sleeve Lycra shirt to feel cold against her skin. She also wore thermal yoga pants, yet still she shivered as she stretched. The rear of Hillhaven formed an “h,” with two additions that had always been called wings, but which were more like stubby abutments put into place when a kitchen and more bedrooms became necessary, one at the turn of the nineteenth century and one predating that by a hundred years. The oldest, the east wing, was closed off and no longer used. She was used to its dead, curtained windows with empty rooms behind the glass.

That part of Hillhaven had been closed off for years, cleaned only in spring when her mother would also have the windows and roof inspected. In fact, she’d wanted to have it torn down when Trinity was a girl, but there had been an odd inheritance stipulation that forbade it.

The grassy area left in the middle of the questionable hug formed by the two wings had been meticulously landscaped by her mother, but there was enough unplanted area for Trinity’s morning Qigong. The familiar repetitive movements of Chinese yoga soothed her and also memorialized Jen Po, the friend she’d lost in the fire. Jen had taught her the Eight Pieces of Brocade that made up Trinity’s morning routine. She focused on each move. Its execution. Its hold. The inhalation and release of every careful breath.

Even in the midst of her meditation she knew the moment Creed watched by the tightening between her shoulder blades. The tension that threatened to become a tingle if she was worlds more brave. On the surface, she ignored him. Her body flowed into Pushing Up the Heavens, but her perception of him was as profound as ever. She knew which window in the west wing he occupied. There was movement and shadow, but there was also more than that.

Awareness.

He added to her fear.

She had always tried so hard to appear normal while at the same time helping redirect others from danger. All too often she was too late, and she was the first person on the scene following one of the many “accidents” in Scarlet Falls. It was why she’d decided to become a nurse.

Constant vigilance and blood on your hands wore on you after a while. You could give up or you could give all you had, and then figure out ways to give some more.

She hadn’t needed a suspicious audience in Samuel Creed.

Her Boston reprieve had been heady, but it had been over too soon.

There had come a point in her dark life that she had to wonder if she was bringing the help or the hell to everyone she met.

It wasn’t only the town that was haunted.She was haunted, too. By memories, both old and recent, and by the persistent ghost of alittle girl who seemed even more determined than ever to not leave her alone.

Moisture pooled in her eyes as a pink wash of sunshine flowed over the gray edges of Hillhaven. Under the ever watchful eyes of Creed, Trinity tried to find her center and her peace, but she failed.

* * *

The box of matches sat open on Trinity’s dresser when she returned to her room. She had stopped in the doorway as she took off her coat and looked carefully around, easily resuming a routine that had been a part of her life in Scarlet Falls for as long as she could remember. It was a habit she should have kept up in Boston.

The sight of the matchbox made her burned arm throb.

Of course, there were matches in the house. Last night Creed must have used them to start the fire in the fireplace that was glowing when she had arrived. But he wouldn’t have carried the box upstairs and placed it on her dresser. He wouldn’t have taken one matchstick and balanced it precariously on the dresser’s edge.

Trinity strained her ears without turning around. The whole of the almost-empty house was at her back. No whisper. No cry. No mischievous laughter.

It was daylight. If it had been after sunset…It was worse after dark. Much worse.

With a burst of speed, she strode to the dresser and put the lone matchstick in the box with its fellows. Then she carried the matchbox into the bathroom, dropped it in the sink and turned the tap on full blast. Only when the cardboard box was a sodden, ruined mess did she turn off the spigot. Matchsticks floated to the surface of the water as the box disintegrated. They swirled around and around as the water wassucked down the drain.

But their hypnotic cyclone ride wasn’t what made Trinity dizzy.

It was the horrible realization that The Girl in Blue was still haunting her after all these years and that she’d somehow found a way to follow Trinity to Boston. In her effort to become a nurse, had she instead brought death all the way from Scarlet Falls to her friend’s door?

She scooped up the ruined matches and threw them in the trash.

She’d seen The Girl in Blue and her matchsticks for years, but the ghost of the little girl had seemed like nothing compared to the much more aggressive entities that threatenedthe town.

Her earliest childhood memories were filled with pain. Jeremy Wyatt had fallen from a rusty swing and broken his arm. She’d seen the push that had sent him to the ground only inches away from a sharp rock that would have broken his head instead. Susan Witcherhad ridden her bike off of Bald Knob and had needed fourteen stitches to repair her knee. Trinity had seen Susan’s helmet slide over her eyes, as if someone had wanted to blind her to the danger of the cliff’s edge.Thomas Craighad “accidentally” ingested a peanut in an ice-cream sundae and almost died. She’d seen him scoop up the deadly nut and place it on his tongue as if he’d been in a trance.

But she’d always been afraid to label the things she’d seen.

She would never be able to forgive herself if the fire in Boston hadn’t been an accident. They had wanted to treat her like a hero, when the reality of what she might have done made her much more the villain.


Chapter Three

Creed had taken over several upstairs rooms. He had watched her from one of them while she was in the courtyard. She was afraid The Girl in Blue might not be finished with her games. Once Trinity changed into a gray-fitted sweater with a matching scarf shot through with silver threads that almost made her eyes look bright, she went to check on him even though she shouldn’t have.

Surprise dispelled some of her fear.

Her parents had only been out of the country for a few weeks, but the rooms were filled—boxes of files, stacks of rolled, yellowed paper that proved to be maps when she fingered their edges, books, newspapers and magazines.

Trinity slowed, walked around each room astonished by all the paraphernalia. Added to the reference materials were other things—memorabilia, knick knacks and photographs.

There was an old rusty wagon with dented sides that squeaked when she nudged it with her foot. In the wagon, a glass jar sat full of the tiny tear-shaped rocks diligent beach combers could find on the shores of High Lake. People called the stones “Maiden’s tears.” Trinity was pretty sure every house in town had a few. There was a lone, scuffed black Mary Jane shoe small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. She held it for only a second because its petite size and its missing companion gave her imagination too many gruesome directions to go. A rag doll with a dingy gingham dress and button eyes forbade her touch by simply being too freaky with its blank sewn-on stare. There was also a stuffed crow with oily black feathers and beaded eyes that glittered as they “watched” her wherever she moved.

Trinity edged away from the bird, not liking the wicked sharpness of its beak forever frozen in a silent caw.

In her need to put distance between herself and the bird’s impossible peck, she bumped into a stack of books piled on a desk almost hidden beneath its load. The stack swayed, but she grabbed the top book and shored up the column of dusty tomes before it could topple.

The name “Chadwick” caught her attention and she looked closer at the glossy jacket of the book. It was all about the witch trials of the seventeenth century. She flipped through its pages. The crudely drawn pen and ink illustrations left her oddly shaken. Hanging. Drowning. Burning at the stake. Rendered in a simple hand with slashing finesse that somehow captured the pain and horror on the faces of the persecuted “witches.”

One drowning bothered her most of all.

It was of a bound woman being doused in a lake whose banks were lined with townspeople watching and waiting for her to die in order to prove her innocence. The “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” hopelessness and savagery of the scene made her chest tighten.

While she’d been trying to forget Scarlet Falls for three long years, Samuel Creed literally surrounded himself with the town and its dark history.

“I don’t like to be disturbed while I’m working,” Creed said gruffly from the doorway.

Trinity carefully closed the book and placed it back where she’d found it. As she did so she saw the author’s name—Samuel Creed. She didn’t turn to face him. She felt like she’d disturbed a dragon in his lair, but Creed’s treasured horde wasn’t gold and precious gems. It was the dusty remains of lives long gone and the shadowed memories of souls whose restless wanderings might be responsible for her darkest fears.

“I don’t like an audience when I meditate,” she replied.

“You’re a beautiful woman,” Creed said.

Trinity straightened the stack of books again to busy her hands. Beautiful? She was short and mousy. Her dark eyebrows were prominent on her face, making her skin porcelain pale. Her eyes were a light hazel and they clashed with her chestnut hair that grew so fast and so wild she constantly fought to tame it.

No one would ever call her a beauty, least of all someone as striking as this man—this author—who had caught her rifling through his things.

“Seen any out-of-place matchboxes lately?” wouldn’t roll off her tongue.

She felt his presence closer behind her even though his feet hadn’t made a sound. She turned. Shewould not be afraid to face him, even if the flush on her cheeks and the quickened beat of her heart warned her otherwise. Considering all else she had to fear, her trepidation was ridiculous.

“You couldn’t have accumulated all of this in only a few short weeks,” she said to his open collar. He’d come that close.

She looked up from the intimacy of that small glimpse of skin at his throat. She met his eyes.

The room was lit by dust-mote filled sunbeams streaming through the windowsmuted by soft red drapes. His eyes matched the onyx chip in his ear despite the light surrounding them.

Looking at him made her feel as if she was about to fall.

His irises were that dark, that limitless.

Her stomach anticipated the drop. Her lungs hitched in a breath to prepare.

“Three years to be exact. I moved in shortly after you moved out. They advertised for a boarder. You didn’t know?” he asked. His voice was even more intimate than the flash of skin at his collar. They might have been talking about something as mundane as renting rooms, but the deep timbre of his tone said that that wasn’t what they were talking about at all.

“No. They never mentioned you,” Trinity said. They might have tried. She’d never given them the chance. Her calls were always brief. The better to forget that she dreaded coming home even as she planned and prepared for it day by day by day.

“And no visits,” Creed pointed out.

Trinity nodded. She also closed her eyes. It was weak, but inevitable, akin to catching herself before she could fall.

“When I first moved in, I thought that you would be back on occasion. I imagined sleeping under the same roof and then I was glad you didn’t come home,” he said.

Her eyes opened in spite of her best intentions. His handsome face was tilted down toward her and its angular lines were shadowed even in the morning light.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Creed said.

“Neither should you,” Trinity replied. She leaned back against the desk to put some distance between them. Six inches was hardly a reprieve.

The whole town had thought him most likely to crash and burn like some rebel teen, not become an historian with his books and memorabilia, and certainly not an author, although his fascination with the occult appeared obvious enough to make her quiver.

“No. You’re right. I shouldn’t be here at all,” Creed agreed. His face tightened. Her attention was drawn by the tension in his jaw. The width of his shoulders. The way his hair brushed his cheeks. Anything and anywhere but his deep, dark eyes.

“Do you remember that day by the lake?” he asked.

And suddenly her gaze went back to his. His eyes were brown. If she looked long enough, if she allowed herself to look long enough…you could see the streaks of dark chocolate in the double shot of near black espresso.

Yes. She could.

And when she did, she realized how much heat it took to melt and blend all those rich colors to create his midnight gleam.

“I remember,” Trinity said.

Her focus dropped to his lips. They had been cold and blue against hers that day, but they had heated, hadn’t they? Once he’d coughed and gasped and came back to life, they had been as warm and wicked and alive as any girl could ask for in her first kiss.

But then she’d spent the next four years of high school and three years in Boston avoiding him and his watchful eyes.

“You tasted like hot chocolate and mint,” Creed said.

He had reached for the end of her shiny scarf and he toyed with it. For some reason, the casual gesture caused heat to rise beneath her skin. Or maybe it was his talk about her taste.

“I saved you,” Trinity said. It hadn’t been about flavorful kisses. It had been about life and death.

“Did you?” Creed asked.

He tugged on the edge of her scarf, firmly but gently. It slid against her skin until the knot caught and then the fabric grew taut against her neck. And still he tugged. Not hard, but insistent. Inexorably. She could resist. She could pull back and away.

She didn’t.

Instead, she let him pull her forward using the gentle tug on her soft scarf as leverage.

He began to wind its length around his fingers—once, twice, again. That was all it took to bring her body flush to his.

He was tall and muscular like a wall ofsolid masculine flesh. His pull had brought her much softer, but much tenser form against his. She was braving the fall by looking into his eyes again and he quirked onebrow and paused, waiting—for what she couldn’t be sure.

Did he expect her to run away?

This close, she could see the damp under layers of his hair and she could detect the scent of soap on his skin. He’d taken a morning shower while she disposed of matches and snooped in his rooms. She could also breathe in the faint mellow bite of the whiskey he’d had before breakfast.

“I shouldn’t be here, but I am. You brought me back from a cold consuming darkness I’d never even known existed. There’s damnation and decadence in that, Trinity, in case you didn’t know,” Creed said. She thought she knew. Somehow. All about darkness and damnation, but not decadence….

Crystalline seconds froze the world around them in that iced November memory, but they weren’t cold now. Not at all.

He dropped his lips to hers in a predatory swoop that had been in the making for seven long years, but he didn’t need the hold he had on her scarf. She held herself still for his descending mouth. She tilted her chin to meet it.

It was a mistake. She accepted the inevitable kiss with the courage she should save to face other things.

His lips were soft, but firm. His tongue, with a hungry flick, brought a hint of expensive Scotch and heat as far removed from November chill as could be. She reached for him, her arms around his neck and one hand burrowed into his hair, but he continued to hold only her scarf as if it was a lifeline.

To save him from what, she couldn’t be sure.

Not Scarlet Falls. He chose to be here. He chose to dive deep into the history of the town.

She was the one who was falling. She could feel the dark hungry maw at her feet. But holding onto Creed only made the fall more imminent.

When she moved her hands to wrap them around the knot he’d made of her scarf, he pulled his lips from hers. Their mouths clung as if in protest for several seconds, but he gave them no mercy. He tilted his chin up to break the contact, but he didn’t let her go. Maybe because her hands were twined around his fist in her scarf and he didn’t want to jar her bandage. Or maybe because he was too busy looking into her eyes.

Trinity shuttered them as fast as she could. She thought of puppy dogs and taxes and how far she would be behind when or if she was ever able to return to school. But somewhere in that mix, erotic thoughts mingled. Like how intoxicating the taste of Scotch was on his tongue even at 9:00 a.m. and how well its rich flavor fit with the shadows in his eyes. And more desperate and wickedthoughts, too. Like maybe, just maybe if she had to face constant threats, she would like to do it with the afterglow of his lovemaking on her lips and on her skin.

“I can’t leave Hillhaven. I have to be here for my work. This is the oldest structure in town. Did you know that?” Creed asked.

He still held her scarf and his eyes still burned. His lips were masculine and firm and also swollen from their kiss. They were only separated from hers by inches. She wanted to narrow that margin, but she held herself very, very still instead.

“The lake is older,” Trinity reminded him, her heartbeat pulsing in her ears.

“I know,” Creed said and she thought she saw the memory of breathing those bleak waters in his face.

His fist loosened in her scarf and she released her hold so he could pull his hand free. But their bodies were still too close for comfort, if comfort didn’t involve increased body heat and an elevated pulse.

Trinity backed away as casually as her instinct to either run or kiss Creed again would allow. Every muscle in her body responded to her inner turmoil with tension. She was coiled inside and out, prepared to spring into his arms or flee. His tense face watched her careful movements with predatory stillness.

He was no more relaxed than she.

When a child’s girlish laughter skittered its eerie tones up Trinity’s spine, she gasped and turned toward the door. Creed reacted, too, but to her sudden movement not to the sound. He put his hand out to her shoulder as if to steady her, but his touch wasn’t comforting. Not when the laughter sounded again in the air all around them.

None of the windows were open. There was no draft from the hallway, but suddenly an old photograph fluttered loose from one of the nearby piles of memorabilia. Maybe she’d dislodged it during her earlier snoop. Or maybe not.

Creed bent down to retrieve the sepia-toned photo before she could reach for it herself. She didn’t have to hold it in her hands to see the brown and black around the edges where the paper had curled and turned to ash after being damaged by some long ago flames.

The Girl in Blue.

Trinity could see the pretty pastel pinafore of robin’s egg blue in the photograph. She’d seen that dress so many times before, disappearing around a corner or lurking in the dark. She could see the corkscrew curls that framed a cherubic face and lips made red by the photo processes of yesteryear. The Girl in Blue had been about eight or nine when the picture was taken. With a start, Trinity looked from the photograph to the ragdoll she’d noticed earlier with its creepy button eyes and back again.

The girl in the photo held the doll to her chest.

“Why do you have all these mementos?” Trinity asked.

Creed glanced at the photo as if he was so familiar with it that he didn’t need to look closely before he placed it back in the pile it had come from.

“Since that day by the lake, Scarlet Falls whispers to me. Whiskey helps. Quiets the noise. But sometimes I look and listen and find and keep,” Creed said.

Whispers.

So Samuel Creed was plagued by whispers. No wonder he seemed to watch her while she braced for screams.


Chapter Four

She had waited for Creed to leave the house before slipping back to his rooms. They’d parted awkwardly, like two boxers retreating to neutral corners of the ring. She told herself discretion was the better part of valor, but in reality a little time in his presence went a long way…especially since she was determined not to eat him alive. He was indelibly entwined with Scarlet Falls. It was almost impossible to tell where Creed began and the town ended. He was fascinated by its darkness. She feared the lake hadn’t really let him go that day, no matter that she had saved him. Giving in to her attraction to him felt like tempting Scarlet Falls to reach out to claim her, as well.

She found the photograph where he had placed it back among the eclectic clutter of his collection which seemed to hold everything from the mundane to the macabre. The crow “watched” her when she picked up the old photo and turned it over in her palm. Worse, the button-eyed doll sat—its creepiness magnified by the evidence of its longevity Trinity held in her hands.




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